Principal Enterprise Architect

Salary: $150,000 – $200,000 per year

Are you ready for something a little different?

To be part of meaningful and interesting work, with fantastic people, real influence and flexibility too? How would it feel to be part of something good in the world?

If this appeals, we’d love to meet you.

Storm Digital Talent is representing a fantastic organisation in the Manawatu region who are seeking a Principal Enterprise Architect as part of an exciting and ambitious digital strategy.

The Opportunity

This is a high impact career step. You’ll have the opportunity to shape what comes next, helping an ambitious technology function make good decisions today while creating the architecture and guardrails for a strong future.

As the practice lead for architecture and cybersecurity, you’ll work alongside senior engineers and squad leads and provide trusted advice to senior leadership. You’ll take the lead in strengthening architecture and assurance, creating common principles, clear direction, and a joined-up view across security, data, AI and delivery. This is a senior individual contributor role, where your influence will come through the level of your expertise, judgement and relationships.

You’ll have the space to understand the current environment, identify what matters and build an approach that works. You’ll establish greater clarity, strong architectural oversight, and practical ways of working that allow teams to make good decisions with confidence.

What makes the role especially interesting is the balance.

There’s rigour here, but also pragmatism. They value sound architecture and appropriate governance without creating unnecessary barriers to progress. This needs someone who can understand different perspectives, exercise good judgement, and find sensible ways forward through competing priorities.

You will:

• Shape enterprise architecture and technology roadmaps aligned with organisational priorities

• Establish practical architecture principles, standards and governance

• Connect architecture, security, assurance, data and delivery into a cohesive technology environment

• Influence important technology decisions and make complex issues understandable to senior leaders

• Help teams navigate trade-offs between pace, security, architectural integrity and longer-term direction

• Explore the potential and implications of AI and other emerging technologies, helping the organisation adopt them thoughtfully

• Create useful guardrails that give teams greater confidence to innovate and move forward

About You

First and foremost, you’ll be an architect.

You’ll have real-world applied architecture experience and a strong grasp of principles, frameworks, governance and technology decision-making. You may already operate at enterprise level, or have progressed through solution, technology or engineering roles and be ready for broader influence.

You’ll enjoy getting underneath a problem before reaching a conclusion. You’ll value thoughtful decision-making, and you’ll also recognise when a good decision now is more useful than a theoretically perfect one later.

You’ll bring:

• Strong architecture knowledge and experience with technology roadmaps and modern cloud environments

• Sound cybersecurity and technology risk knowledge, including security and assurance principles

• An contemporary understanding of AI, data and emerging technology and what they mean for future architecture

• The judgement to apply frameworks intelligently rather than mechanically

• An ability to see patterns, dependencies and consequences across a complex technology environment

• Credibility with technical colleagues and the ability to communicate clearly with non-technical leaders

• The confidence to challenge constructively, listen to different perspectives and influence without relying on hierarchy

Why Working With Them Is Great

• Strong leadership, a positive future vision and a very interesting technology journey ahead

• A rare opportunity to shape architectural direction and make your mark as digital capability continues to evolve

• Interesting challenges spanning enterprise architecture, cloud, cybersecurity, data, AI and emerging technology

• The satisfaction of seeing your thinking translate into clearer decisions, stronger practices and visible organisational progress

• The opportunity to broaden your enterprise-level experience while deepening your architectural expertise

• Hybrid working and genuine flexibility

SFIA Skills

This organisation uses the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) to define the professional capabilities most relevant to the role.

You may not have all of these skills, but you’ll likely bring a combination of them, along with experience in closely related areas. Find out more at sfia.nz/sfia9.

• Enterprise and Business Architecture (STPL)

• Emerging Technology Monitoring (EMRG)

• Stakeholder Relationship Management (RLMT)

• Information Security (SCTY)

• Information Assurance (INAS)

If this sounds like you, please apply today. We’d love to get to know you.

Storm Digital Talent is recruiting for this role on behalf of our client, who is an equal opportunities employer. They value diversity and are committed to building an inclusive environment for all their people.